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U.S. Commits War Crimes in Iraq?

To be expected, the U.S. government/military denounces the latest Wikileaks expose of U.S. atrocities and war crimes against Iraq. That the truth about U.S. atrocities against a sovereign nation is exposed and documented continues to be a source of chagrin, even fear among U.S. officials –especially those who are guilty and complicit.

(Reuters) – WikiLeaks released nearly 400,000 classified U.S. files on the Iraq war on Friday, some detailing gruesome cases of prisoner abuse by Iraqi forces that the U.S. military knew about but did not seem to investigate.

The Pentagon decried the website’s publication of the secret reports — the largest security breach of its kind in U.S. military history, far surpassing the group’s dump of more than 70,000 Afghan war files in July.

U.S. officials said the leak endangered U.S. troops and threatened to put some 300 Iraqi collaborators at risk by exposing their identities.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. insisted upon war crimes trials of Nazi war criminals [See: Avalon Project, Nuremberg War Crimes Trials]. Now it would appear, the shoe is on the other foot and, like Nazis, the U.S. brass are crying ‘foul’, denouncing Wiki for daring to expose the U.S. ‘capital’ war crimes against Iraq.

According to The Guardian, the logs “detail torture, summary executions and war crimes [by Iraqi Security Forces]“.[2]

The logs showed a far higher civilian death toll than was previously stated. 66,000 civilians were reported dead in the logs, 15,000 more than had been admitted by the US government.[8]

According to the logs, abuse of prisoners by Iraqi troops under US training was more wide-spread than formerly known.[8] Even after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse incident came to light in 2004, abuse of prisoners or detainees by Iraqi security forces was common and rarely acted upon; in one recorded case, US troops wrote “no investigation is necessary” in response to claims of abuse by prisoners.[8] According to The Guardian, US officials “ignored torture” and “the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring such allegations”.[2]

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, one report shows that “the US military cleared an Apache helicopter gunship to open fire on Iraqi insurgents who were trying to surrender”.[10]

According to Wired Magazine, “WikiLeaks may have just bolstered one of the Bush administration’s most controversial claims about the Iraq war: that Iran supplied many of the Iraq insurgency’s deadliest weapons and worked hand-in-glove with some of its most lethal militias. The documents indicate that Iran was a major combatant in the Iraq war, as its elite Quds Force trained Iraqi Shiite insurgents and imported deadly weapons like the shape-charged Explosively Formed Projectile bombs into Iraq for use against civilians, Sunni militants and U.S. troops.”[8] –Wikileaks

In the meantime, the Pentagon resorts to a tired ‘excuse’. They claim the leaks will endanger the lives of U.S. personnel. BULL(*)(*)(*)(*)! Sending U.S. personnel to Iraq in violation of international laws that the U.S. itself had insisted upon at the end of World War II is what has –in fact –endangered the lives of U.S. citizens both at home and in Iraq and does so by placing naive but patriotic ‘soldiers’ in the line of fire in a war of naked aggression, in fact, a war crime by U.S. laws, specifically U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441.

§ 2441. War crimes(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death. --U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441″>TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 118 > § 2441